Light and life adrift "Matter, as it were, is condensed or frozen light." 1 Familiarity arises when you meet Cassandra Laing’s latest paintings of icy landscapes. At first glance you recognise wilderness images and prepare to celebrate the richness and precariousness of life. However, you soon realise there is no life here, only light, while an uncanny familiarity remains. Galaxies and night skies also feature as familiar scenes among the Antarctic vistas. You imagine that Laing can spend hours staring at the sky and sea by sharing her view through these paintings. As you stare with her, the stars and ice stop your eye and expand your vision by turning the surrounding blankness into the deep forever of infinity. The ice and stars become signposts of the infinite. As they point to infinity their own finite status is highlighted. Life on this planet relies on the sun and we invest much in the hope and fear that her siblings, the stars, foster other life through their light and warmth. While we are accustomed to seeing a constant set of stars in our skies, and know that they have been relied on over millennia for navigation and spiritual direction, they are not forever. Stars twinkle. Twinkling is the consequence of burning, and burning marks transition and impermanence. The starlight we see each night is millions of years old and its source may no longer exist. Newborn stars, though emanating light, remain invisible. Antarctica pulsates. The landscapes of Antarctica are also born away from sight, in the long dark of winter, when the continent builds an expansive skirt of ice. The ice captures light and heat as summer arrives. As the summer days meld into one, the ice melts and the skirt fractures, slipping back into the sea. At the heart of this rhythm lies the frozen and apparently constant interior which features in several of Laing’s paintings. While we may expect to stop here, these paintings don’t let us rest. Two of the smaller panels move us towards an infinite horizon, while the magnificent Impasse (2003), blocks our passage, forcing us up to a sliver of sky. Laing is not concerned with sitting still or constancy as the title of this show - adrift - makes clear. Most of the Antarctic paintings represent the liminal spaces that fringe the continent and their fraying in summer. Laing reveals this process through the extraordinary, luminous forms that are the subject of these paintings. Impermanence and the embodiment of light are the recurring theme. Impermanence and light converge in the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, in particular the teachings on the ‘rainbow body’. We are told that when an accomplished practitioner dies they "enable their body to be reabsorbed back into the light essence of the light elements that created it, and consequently their material body dissolves into light and then disappears completely… [T]he dissolution is often accompanied by spontaneous manifestations of light and rainbows." 2 So light creates life and upon death is returned as light. Laing’s representations of Antarctic ice, placed in this Buddhist context, capture this light, like a frozen rainbow adrift, and when it melts returns the light as life. A beautiful painting of algae, Luminous Life-forms (2003), helps us comprehend this by explicitly linking light with life. Living in the water beneath the melting ice, algae turns light into life through photosynthesis. The theme of new life is emphasised by our knowledge that algae were one of the first life-forms and lives in the ocean, from which all life emerged. However, this algae not only turns light to life, for at night it emits light like tiny stars filling the sea. Light and life are not simply entwined in this painting, they become one. When light hits the Earth’s atmosphere it refracts into myriad life-forms onto which all the complexities of everyday survival adhere. Laing’s paintings suggest that this complexity is distilled to light upon death. Light frames our lives, like the icy terrain that caps the globe. All lives must pass through this state, which, like lines of longitude converging at the poles, looks like a star and faces infinity. Maybe it is this shared future and past, amplified through Laing’s explorations of light and life, that produces the uncanny familiarity and beauty of these paintings. Dean Mundey November 2003 1. David Bohm, physicist, quoted in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Sogyal Rinpoche. Random House, Sydney, 1992. p 275. 2. Ibid., p 167. Dean Mundey has undertaken degree studies in agriculture, comparative religion, botany, cultural studies and art history. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Queensland and a Bachelor of Letters from the University of Melbourne, where he currently works for the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. All of his interests converge, and emerge, in his Footscray backyard where they mingle with those of his partner. His most significant experience of recent times was his walking of the 750km Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across the north of Spain in September/October 2001. It was through lengthy discussions about the Camino with Cassandra Laing in the months before and after the pilgrimage that their friendship deepened. Their friendship continues to point the way - the Camino continues.